Elixir
by xlunaxwolfx
Summary: One Romance, so many secrets.


**Emily POV.**

My eyes fluttered awake in the morning sun, as I rolled over she stirred slightly in her sleep. God, she was beautiful when she slept. As I scanned my eyes over her face it was pretty apparent to me that I was safe to move. She was out cold. As I move on the mattress, I felt something hard under my elbow. I moved the pillow under my head slight being careful not to wake her. I lifted the corner of the mattress slightly, and looked over the edge of the bed to see what it was. A notebook it seemed. But why hide it? Who am I kidding its ally. The cover was black, I quietly rose out of the bed with it under my arm and scurried back into my own room before the orderlies did rounds and found me in Ali's bed. That would mean solitary for sure.

A lot had been going on with Ali these days. I was scared for her. Maybe what was in here would help me understand what was going on. Or let me know how to help her. I wasn't normally the type of person to go through her things, but she's completely shutting me out these past few months. I don't know what else there is to do. I stared at the cover for a few moments before I began reading..

 **Alison POV:**

I woke to a throbbing headache and sweat glistening my face. My heart was pounding out of my chest.

Another nightmare. For fuck sakes when is this gonna stop.

I rolled over and laid for a minute before my alarm went off.

Perfect.

I've been up for five minutes and I already feel it.

Like my life is lacking something I'm not even sure exists. I feel so empty lately. Like I've been missing out on life. Probably because I have.

Radley Sanitarium. Being in here is no picnic that's for sure. And there definitely isn't much connection to the real world. Not from a place like this. I don't even know how they're aloud to keep people locked up in here, but then again knowing myself and all I've done, sometimes its for the better.

Its like I've lost all connection to the things that surround me. Even myself. I can't connect my feelings to anything anymore.

Its like I'm always treading water. If something bad happens, I'm level. And if something good happens I just… stay level. But out of the blue, I can get delusional with happiness or plagued with this crippling depression. I guess those are the perks of being bipolar. But lately there's more going on. Nothing feels the same.

Maybe it's the drugs.

But which ones?

The ones I used to run away? Or the ones I'm they're using to keep me sane?

Its hard to tell anymore. I can't even remember what I'm like without something in my system altering my thoughts and feelings. I've been medicated since I was twelve years old for Christ sakes. I don't even know if the old me exists to go back to anymore. It feels like my whole personality is just one giant side effect. The things I say, the things I do, they don't feel like me. It doesn't feel like I am in control of my brain anymore. I've never felt more disconnected.

That's the thing about drugs. They take away way more than anyone thinks. But its always the drugs that are supposed to help you that hurt you. I don't think ill ever be the same person I was before all of this. All my life I've had to deal with taking pills that made me feel like crap. I've had to decide that the side effects, health and fertility risks, being suicidal, being depressed and anxious all the time, I've had to say that that's all worth it just in the tiniest glimmer of hope that it might change my head the right way and I would be okay. Which is probably why I started using. Side effects between prescription drugs and hard drugs couldn't be that much different right? I was already risking everything to try and be happy. So, I figured I might as well try something that was more than likely going to work.

I was always happiest when I was using.

Or at least that's what I thought at the time.

Now I look back and all I can think is I should have been hurting. I should have been feeling, and healing from the trauma that circled around me for years. But I couldn't hurt anymore. At a young age I had already experienced so much of the ugly side of life that at nine years old I was ready for an escape. The escape was easy. The coming back, I still haven't recovered from. Who knows if I ever will.

 **Emily's POV**

I bit my nails as my eyes scanned the pages, this was some sort of journal. The doctors talked about doing this. Ali is the last one I thought would take it seriously.

Here goes nothing..

So I heard in group today that writing things down can help to get closure. Seems stupid enough I know. But I don't know how to feel about anything right now. All I know is I need to get my words out somehow. I've been silent for months now. My mind is jumbled. Like the pieces to a puzzle that's still in the box.

But that's why I'm writing this down. I want to start writing what goes on in my head. Maybe so I can figure it out myself, but mostly So I can eventually show this to Em. She tries so hard but its impossible for her to understand how this disease changes everything for me. I haven't been giving her anything to go off of and I can tell its upsetting her. I know she just wants to help. I don't want to, but I need her to know everything. How most days its hard to get out of bed. And to finally tell her how I got here. I don't know why I haven't, I just cant expect someone like her to understand. She's so pure, she would never be able to comprehend the things I've done, the things I've seen. Well Em. This is what its like to go to hell and come back.

But to explain everything, we need to go deep into the past. To the reason I started running.

And it all starts with her.

I was shaking.

Ali had been silent for months. She wont even acknowledge anything going on around her. She just sits, and stares at the wall. I don't even think I've seen her move aside from when they wheel her food in and she sits up to eat. This is the only way I can get inside her head. The only way I can try and bring her back. She's still in there somewhere. When I think about why I'm here, I know what got me admitted, my dad killing himself had really don't a number on my own mental health, I had stopped eating, stopped talking, I stopped everything. My mom, she just didn't know what to do. Deep down I know she was just trying to protect me from myself, because she couldn't protect dad. I was all she had left. And that's all that is keeping my alive. I need to get better for her. I need to be able to be strong for her. I have never felt so guilty in all my life for what I had let myself become. She needed strength, and I gave her more weakness. And I will never forget the look on her face as she dropped me off. Like she would never see me again. So, I had to do everything in my power to make sure she did. I had to get out of here. But maybe I was here for another reason. Maybe I was supposed to help her. Even if I wasn't I at least have to try right?

So I kept reading..

We never really had a relationship, me and my mom.

She was like me.

Disconnected.

But the thing about my mom is she still has no idea that she has a problem. She's still scared and angry, and can't deal with the things that she has put me- put everyone through. Still can't accept what she's done. And if anyone understands that I do. But there comes a time you need to grow wiser from the bad and start to integrate new behaviour into yourself to replace the bad. She's still lost. And even then she didn't know. I understand that now. And I've forgiven her as much as I can. Tried to see the good in it as much as possible. But her memories still haunt me. And those memories, as hard to drudge up as they are, is where we have to start our first chapter.

Every time I start spiraling it all either starts with her, or comes back to her.

I guess I can say my mom was always a kept woman. She had caramel blonde hair, which she kept at her shoulders, always dressed to the occasion, no matter what It was, manicure /pedicure normally. She was like any other mom. From the outside looking in she seemed hardened and cold, though most people knew her to be kind, no one ever crossed her. She always got her way.

From a young age, I can remember her outbursts.

The yelling, the crying, the things she would say while she was manic, the objects flying through the air and across the room, I didn't understand fully then but when you break it down it did and still plays a big part in my life. Not being able to recognize her some days from the person I was at least half used to.

I still remember the fights. My parents fought.. a lot. But on this specific day, my mother threw the remote control at my father. It smashed, and the batteries flew along with both pieces of the remote onto the hardwood floor. Me being the weird, naive kid I was went to pick it up and put the batteries back into it. All the while my parents yelled back and forth on either side of me. I handed the remote back to my mother. She grabbed it from my hands hastily and repeated herself. Another huge crash sounded as the remote hit the wood for the second time.

I don't know why I did it. But it was all I could do to make things better at the time. It was all I could think of. Just fixing the remote over and over as she repeatedly kept bouncing it off the floor. Its an odd memory I know but its stuck with me for years. Clear as day.

It seemed like a game to her at the time.

But stuff like that I slowly grew used to, it was around the time I was nine, when she started dieting that I remember her get worse. She started weight watchers, which was good, she wanted to get healthy and loose some weight, I totally understood that. I myself was a chubby kid and always hated my body.

But I can pinpoint this one day, this was the day that my eating disorder manifested itself.

She had just gotten back from the grocery store, with all my favorite food. I was over the moon as any kid would be at that age. I immediately went for the junk food (again as any kid would) now usually if a child is trying to get into something, that you don't want you to have you obviously say something right? Of course! That's you being a parent. However, the second my hand hit the bag of chips I heard my mother chime in from beside me.

"If you keep eating all that garbage you're going to be as big as a house, look at you"

My face fell as I let what she had said sink in.

I put the chips back into the cupboard and sat down on the couch.

As she started supper, I went into my room.

I remember standing in front of the mirror for the better part of an hour. Squeezing and poking at the baby fat that was still clinging to me at nine years old. I remember wishing that I could just cut it off somehow. Or get rid of it. I had never been more ashamed of myself. no matter how passive the comment may seem to some people, that day my whole world changed. I started associating being skinny with something that would make my mother proud. I strived to be what I thought she had wanted me to be, all of my life. I always struggled to make my life into something that she could be proud of. I got straight A's in school, I kept my hair up for the first six years of school because she was phobic level scared I would get lice even through it gave me migraines. I only hung out with people at school because I wasn't aloud to have my friends over. I literally lived to please that women. But nothing was ever good enough.

I just noticed I'm biting my nails.

Even thinking about her makes me anxious.

After that day I started watching everything I ate. Counting the weight watcher's points like I saw my mom do. She had put this seed in my head that I needed to change. I needed to be better. At first it was just little things like cutting out eating certain foods because I knew they were bad for me. Only eating a certain number of calories per meal. It started harmless. But it quickly turned into something very ugly. I lost eighty pounds in one semester of eighth grade. I was going days without food, I was half blacked out whenever I got up too fast, it was terrifying. I would look at pictures of me at that time and think to myself " I look sick." But I couldn't stop. I had grown so used to consuming so little that I didn't even feel hunger anymore. There were times everyone was always complimenting me, telling me that they were jealous of how tiny I was. And times where people told me that they were genuinely concerned for my well being. I took both as compliments at the time. Both meant that I was doing what I thought I needed to do.

I closed the book on my lap as a tear slid down my face.

How could she not tell me any of this? How had I known her for a year, and she had mentioned nothing. More importantly, how was I supposed to look her in the face and act like I didn't know?

I wanted to stop reading, but I couldn't help myself, if she was hiding something like an eating disorder, what else was going on that she hadn't told me? I turned another page and timidly started on the next entry.

Time to get back at it I suppose. It's been a strange day. This is the first time in a long time I've wanted to do it. The first time I cut myself, I was twelve years old. I had heard about people doing it. But I had never tried up to that point. The first time was out of curiosity. I just wanted to know what it felt like. Maybe I was hoping that I could find a way to deal everything I was going through. My parents, my love hate relationship with food. And the fact that I was trying to make everything a level of perfection that simply does not exist. However. The first time I cut myself was another story. It wasn't about being sad, or wanting to die. It was about feeling better. Even for a second. I took apart a sharpener I had asked my nan to buy me for school and got the blade out of it using a screwdriver. I held it in my hands for an extremely sentimental few moments. Then I lined it up against my wrist and swiped hard across. I waited for a few minutes as I watched blood run down my arm for the first time. And for the first time in a long time, I cried, and I didn't cry because I was scared. I cried because this was something I had needed for so long. A sigh of relief. Something that made me focus on it no matter what else was going on in my head. Something that made my head go quiet. So I did it again. I stopped at three, and I laid back as I felt the warm pain run through my arm and leaned against the wall. It was like I was getting high, like everything just stopped after what felt like about an hour I went to the sink to wash it clean. I can still remember the tinted water running down the drain, feeling the sting of the water on the still bleeding wounds I had inflicted. It was like everything that was inside me, all the pain and all the hurt just washed away with the blood.

After that all I recall is bandaging myself up, pulling down my sleeves and going into my room to lay down. As I laid there running my fingers over the bandage on my arm, I had never felt so calm. Like everything had just shifted. All I could focus on was the pain that I could feel, now, all the way to my elbow, I remember focusing solely on the throbbing and eventually falling asleep.

 **Alison's POV**

I finally made it out of bed and into the shower. Slowly I felt my whole body relax for th first time in weeks. I just stood there a moment. Staring at the wall. I thought about Emily. One moment turned into twenty pretty quickly and As I snapped back into reality I realized that my shower had turned cold, and shut it off, quickly grabbing my towel off the rack. As I cozied into it I sat down on the toilet and inspected my left arm, slowly running my finger down the scars angerly drawn from wrist to elbow. I felt slightly nostalgic. Odd I know, but I had stopped cutting now for years, and its something that was a part of me for so long, that it still feels like a piece of me is missing without it. But I can't go back to that. Not after all this time. Not because I don't want to, but because, I don't know what I would be capable of in the wrong mood. And I've learned the hard way not to trust myself when it comes to playing with death. I've come too close to loosing, too many times. And somehow all of the shit that I've been dealing with my whole life, the mood swings, the outbursts, the loneliness, the crying, the screaming, the awful coping mechanisms, it all started to get worse just in different ways. And now if I let myself give into those impulses, drugs, cutting, my anorexia, I'm scared that I won't be able to stop myself, and when it comes down to it. A big enough part of me really doesn't want to die that I don't even give myself the chance anymore. I couldn't put anyone I know through loosing me in such an awful manner. I'm not out to hurt anyone.

9


End file.
